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336
THE ALPHABET
(4) All historical and cultural evidence is best co-ordinated by the theory which considers the early Aramaic alphabet as the prototype of the Brahmi script. The acknowledged resemblance of the Brahmi signs to the Phoenician letters also applies to the early Aramaic letters, while in my opinion there can be no doubt that of all the Semites, the Aramæan traders were the first who came in direct communication with the IndoAryan merchants.
We need not assume that the Brahmi is a simple derivative of the Aramaic alphabet. It was probably mainly the idea of alphabetic writing which was accepted, although the shapes of many Brahmi signs show also Semitic influence and the original direction of the Brahmi character, from right to left, was also of Semitic origin. It is generally admitted that the earliest known form of the Brahmi is a script framed by Brahmans for writing Sanskrit, and it may be assumed that they were the inventors of this essentially national alphabet, regardless of the problem concerning the original source of the idea. The fully developed Brahmi system, an outcome of the remarkable philological and phonological precision wherein the early Indians surpassed all ancient peoples, provided the various Indian languages with an exact reflex of their pronunciation.
It is an open question and quite unimportant, whether the Aramæans brought the alphabet to India, or the Indian merchants who introduced it into India after having learned it in Babylon or elsewhere.
Some scholars hold that, as the Indian writing is in appearance a syllabary, it could not have been derived from an alphabet; alphabetic script being obviously more advanced than syllabic. These scholars seem to have forgotten that the Semitic alphabet did not contain vowels, and whilst the Semites could, if necessary, dispense with vowel-signs, the Indo-European languages could not do so. The Greeks solved this problem satisfactorily; but the Indians were less successful. It may be that the inventor of the Brahmi did not grasp the essence of the alphabetic system of writing. It is quite possible that the Semitic script appeared to him as semi-syllabic, as it could seem to any speaker of an Indo-Aryan language. Indeed, the Hebrew even now writes k-t-b to indicate any word having a meaning connected with "writing," although the word would never be read ktb, but katab ("he wrote"), keteb ("he is writing"), kt b ("I shall write"), and so forth, according to the sense of the sentence; whereas in an IndoAryan tongue, a word written with mere consonants would have many meanings or no meaning at all (e.g., in English c-t could mean "cat," "cut," "cot," "city," "cute," "act," "acute," or no meaning at all).
The fact that the sound a is inherent in all the consonants of the Indian scripts unless otherwise indicated, is perhaps due to the influence of the Aramaic language, in which the final aleph predominated.
As to the date of the origin of the Brahmi script, nothing is certain; the eighth or seventh century B.c. seem to be the most probable.
